Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild is a lot of things—Renoirian screwball, Gen-X The Odd Couple, defense for the reggae mixtape—but it’s a road movie first and foremost.
For all its discussions of morals and metaphysics, Stalker is ultimately a film about criticism—not in the sense of simply pronouncing something wasteful or worthwhile, but in the explicative sense, wherein interpreting an object or experience imparts a particular way of seeing.
In Fellini's La Strada, we enter another plane by grace of Gelsomina. Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina) is the Spirit, the Soul. She will play the trumpet.
Bookended by the post-industrial Midwestern hellscapes of Stranger Than Paradise and the twilight tourist Americana of Mystery Train, Jim Jarmusch's Down by Law takes us to the bayous of New Orleans, where a pimp, a radio DJ, and an Italian traveler all wind up in jail.
Whereas Hirokazu Kore-eda's Shoplifters is a fairly stationary film, charting one family’s experiences in and around their cramped Tokyo home, Broker is a story of people on the move.
In its own time, this hard-to-pigeonhole ambling road picture had as much trouble finding its place in the world as Max and Lion. But the past decade has seen Scarecrow garner a cult following, with Pacino and Hackman both publicly praising it, and director Jerry Schatzberg even rhapsodizing about a sequel.
